Global Jazz with Asha Parkinson's Kalpadruma Sextet

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Ticket Type	Standard Admission

An evening of vibrant Global Jazz Music featuring material from the new album ‘Possession’

Dynamic and prolific 23-year-old London-based saxophonist, composer, and arranger, Asha Parkinson founded Kalpadruma in 2017 to explore authentic, vital, and exciting meeting points between Jazz, Contemporary Classical, Mediterranean, Arab, and Indian music traditions. To date, different formations of the group ranging from a qanun and saxophone duo to the full 14-piece mini-studio orchestra have performed at high-profile venues including Ronnie Scott’s, Jazz Seven Leeds, and the Union Chapel.

The group’s debut EP ‘Onwards’ was described as a ‘musical tapestry’ by Jazz in Europe’s Isabel Marquez. Meanwhile, the group’s unreleased album ‘Possession’ explores that one notion from different angles – through obsessive love to mystical inspiration and beyond, drawing on themes from folk legends and fairy tales to Tolstoy, Rumi, and ancient Aramaic.

The programme is a fast-paced cinematic journey combining material from the EP, unreleased material from ‘Possession’, alongside original arrangements of key influences including Turkish Bağlama Music and Paco de Lucia.

This sextet line-up allows the material to be portrayed in a particularly intimate way, showcasing the performers’ improvisational voices as much as Asha’s compositions and arrangements.

Artist Bio

Asha Parkinson is an award-winning young saxophonist, composer, and arranger who is making an impact on the UK music scene through the unique sound of her work, which blurs boundaries between musical styles and traditions, from Mingus to Arabic maqam, from funk to flamenco compas and Indian tala, from the modal polyphony of the Notre Dame School to Olivier Messaien and Astor Piazzola. Described as ‘a phenomenal talent’ (Jazz South), as a performer, she was three times a semi-finalist in the BBC Young Jazz Musician competition and regularly plays at major jazz venues across the country, with her own band and a range of other groups including Issie Barratt’s renowned all-female INTERCHANGE ensemble (for which she was recently commissioned to write).

As a composer, she was shortlisted in the BBC Inspire Composers’ Competition in 2016, was a finalist in the 2019 Society for Recorder Players’ Composer Competition and shortlisted for the Ligeti Quartet’s 2020 Workout Scheme. In 2021, Jazz South commissioned Asha to write Encounters, a powerful suite bringing together the collective, members of the Orchestra of Syrian Musicians, and the feminist poetry of Maram al-Masri.